NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover

3 image composite - Sol 4437

This image was taken by MAST_RIGHT onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4437 January 29, 2025

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk

Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm, on January 23, 2025, Sol 4432 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Dust devils in Arabia Terra - Perseverance NavCam - Sol 1398

This enhanced processing of Navcam Left images shows several dust devils moving across the floor of Arabia Terra, just outside of Jezero crater.

The largest dust devil in the foreground is at least 300 meters high (328 yards).

The largest dust devil starts at the edge of the crater which is located 1 kilometer east of the rover's location (~5/8 mile)

For scale the crater floor viewed from this direction is close to 220 meters wide (722 ft)

The original sequence lasts about 2.5 minutes, and was taken around 12:26 local mean solar time.

This is a reduced resolution version of the animation by Simeon Schmauß.

You can find the full resolution (wider) MP4 version on Flickr using this link

In this GIF, I see three dust devils, it looks like there are at least 4 in the full size (uncropped) version on Flickr.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Simeon Schmauß

Note - Accidentally posted to the wrong group...

Annotated screen capture of the ESA mission map (with scale bar)

Sol 4432 - 15 overlapping De-Bayered L-MastCam frames assembled into a mosaic using MS-ICE

De-Bayering credits: fredk, Images NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A drive on sol 4439 took Curiosity southwest to the rim of a pair of impact craters at the edge of Texoli butte. The mission update for Sols 4425-4426 names the craters as “Rustic Canyon” and “Runyon Canyon”. Here's the drive details (from JSON) and a quick screen grab from the mission map that shows the path of the drive in yellow.

DRT polished spot in the workspace before an APXS acquisition. This MAHLI was acquired after the APXS integration. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M Gill

Mars Guy - Episode 198

The Curiosity rover has a camera calibration target with features that are both functional and a bit quirky.

A Lincoln penny is a nod to how geologists sometimes use a coin for scale in field photos, but this one has endured conditions like no other.

The 15 base subframe images were taken by MAST_LEFT onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4425 (16 January 2025). The images were Bayer reconstructed, then assembled into the mosaic using MS-ICE.

Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk

Sol 4425 (January 16, 2025) - Curiosity is about 24 m / 78 ft from Grant Lake, a small, roughly elliptic, impact crater (20 m x 26 m / 65.6 x 82 ft ) carved into the base of Texoli butte. The drive to site 112.1326 during sol 4425 was 41.95 m / 137.6 ft long, with a climb of 5.84 m (19.5 ft). The drive was ~south and the duration was close to 44 minutes. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JV & Fernando Nogal

A series of post-drive R-NavCams roughly stitched together, the composite image shows the terrain in front of the rover from site 112.1014 during mission Sol 4423.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I'll add the location and drive details as soon as I see them posted by JPL

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Andrew Bodrov

The fires that spread destruction across the Los Angeles region this week and killed at least 11 people have spared two famed scientific facilities: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has spearheaded planetary missions and astronomy efforts, and the historic Mount Wilson Observatory. While the Eaton blaze that has destroyed nearly 14,000 acres and 7000 buildings in Altadena and Pasadena stayed an appreciable distance away from JPL, flames from that fire continued to climb towards Mount Wilson until eventually stopping at the edge of the observatory’s grounds on 9 January.

“Thanks to the efforts of our firefighters and observatory staff, no buildings or infrastructure have been destroyed” at these facilities, said Anthony Marrone, the LA county fire chief, in a press briefing this afternoon. Still, JPL director Laura Leshin said on X that more than 150 of her staff have lost their homes to fire. And some Mount Wilson employee have evacuated and don’t know when they can return. “For us, the story is about our employees, and not about the facility” says Veronica McGregor, a spokesperson for JPL.

In preparation for the Eaton fire, one of six scattered across Los Angeles, JPL moved operations of its Deep Space Network, an international network that commands and communicates with space-based missions, to a back-up operations center and instructed all employees to work from home.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program

Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / 360pano.eu

#Mars360 #Video360 #360VR #Mars #Sol4249

The Right Mast Camera took these images of the camera on the rover's arm, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). The left side image was acquired 81 sols after landing, the right side image was taken 4417 sols after landing. When the images were taken, the arm had raised the turret to about the same height as the camera on the mast. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk

We have to expect reduced commanding of the rovers and associated downlink of new images

Text of release:- JPL to Remain Closed Until Monday, January 13 2025

Posted on January 08, 2025 at 11:51 AM

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is within the mandatory evacuation zone for the Eaton Fire and is closed to employees and visitors on Wednesday, Jan. 8. The laboratory will remain closed until Monday, Jan 13. Additional updates on the Laboratory’s status will be posted on this site (emergency.jpl.nasa.gov).

Currently, JPL facilities, labs and hardware are secured and protected. Deep Space Network operations, normally conducted at JPL, have been moved offsite to a back-up operations center.

As of Tuesday night, employees were directed to work from home, with only a small number of critical personnel on-site Wednesday morning. Our Protective Services Department is maintaining constant communication with the Eaton Fire emergency command center, and the Laboratory is currently receiving assistance from the LA County Fire Department.

Also on Tuesday night, the mesa above JPL was made available to support firefighting helicopters; however, flights were cancelled due to high winds. The mesa remains available to assist firefighting efforts aimed at protecting nearby neighborhoods and JPL itself.

The safety of our employees is our top priority. We also keep our neighboring communities—many of which are home to our employees and their families—in our thoughts as they endure the challenges and devastation of this fire.

Earth planning date: Monday, Jan. 6, 2025

After our marathon holiday plan, we’re easing back into the new year with a standard two-sol plan. We did arrive today to the news that the drive hadn’t made it as far as we wanted, but luckily the rover planners determined that we were still in a good position to do contact science on two wintry targets — “Snow Creek” and “Winter Creek.” We also packed in lots of remote science with ChemCam using LIBS on “Grapevine” and “Skull Rock,” and we are doing long-distance imaging of the Texoli and Wilkerson buttes, and Gould Mesa. Mastcam will be imaging a number of targets near and far as well including “Red Box”’ “Point Mugu,” “Stone Canyon,” “Pine Cove,” and “Hummingbird Sage,” which will examine various structures in the bedrock. We can’t forget about the atmosphere either — we have a couple dust-devil surveys to look for dust lifting, but the real star of the show (at least for me) is the cloud imaging.

While we’re just into 2025 here on Earth, we’re also near the start of a new year on Mars! A Mars year starts at the northern vernal equinox (or the start of autumn in the southern hemisphere, where Curiosity is), and Mars year 38 started on Nov. 12.

We’re about a third of the way through autumn on Mars now, and the southern Martian autumn and winter bring one thing — clouds! Near the start of the Martian year we start seeing clouds around sunset. These are noctilucent (meaning “night illuminated”) clouds. Even though the sun has set in Gale Crater, the clouds are high enough in the atmosphere that the sun still shines on them, making them seem to almost glow in the sky. You can see this with clouds on Earth, too, around twilight! Mars year 38 will be our fourth year capturing these twilight clouds, and the Navcam images (one of which you can see above) already show it’s shaping up to be another year of spectacular clouds!

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University

Left-MastCam - The images for this panorama were acquired by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 30,000 pixels width, includes 307 images taken on Sol 4400 (December 22, 2024).

Source images credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS/Andrew Bodrov